People who go under the knife to get their knees replaced in Strathroy have waited an average of 671 days for surgery as delays in Southwestern Ontario hospitals balloon to stunning levels, the latest provincial data show.

The wait time for knee replacement surgery in Strathroy is the longest in Ontario, while Stratford is running the second-highest wait in the province for those needing a hip replacement: the average wait there was 364 days.

It’s not just patients seeking care in smaller regional hospitals who face massive delays. In London, the region’s largest medical centre, patients waited an average of 307 days to replace a knee and 299 days to replace a hip in July — both marks well above Ontario average waits of 211 days for knees and 179 days for hips.

“Our wait times are some of the worst in the province,” said Michael Barrett, who oversees health care spending in the region for the South West Local Health Integration Network.

With patients in so much pain for such a long time, Barrett fears some become addicted to pain-killing opioids, a class of drugs that’s left a trail of overdose deaths.

“It ties with (the) opioid issue,” he said. “It can lead to addiction.”

Wait times are too long across Ontario — one quarter of patients don’t get surgery within the recommended 180 days, even after a surgeon has deemed the operation necessary, Barrett said.

But patients in some part of the province are getting much quicker access while those in the southwest suffer near-worst waits. The London region may be getting short-changed by how Ontario’s Health Ministry distributes funds for hip and knee replacement surgeries, Barrett said.

Judy Congdon shows how difficult standing is with her bad left hip. Congdon will wait two years for a hip replacement in London, Ont. (MIKE HENSEN, The London Free Press)

The waits now are even worse than they were in 2015 when hospitals in the London region were forced to cancel and delay surgeries because they’d already used so much of their budget to put a dent in the backlog.

That nightmare for patients is repeating itself.

Londoner Judy Congdon waited more than a year to have her right knee replaced when her Strathroy surgeon told her he’d have to replace her left hip next. Told last year to expect surgery in September 2017, her date in the operating room was cancelled, and the surgery delayed a second year, because funding for surgery in Strathroy had dried up.

“It’s not the doctor. It’s the medical system in Ontario,” the 77-year-old Congdon said Monday.

An active woman who worked for decades for London Life and Western University, loved to garden and travel, and volunteered the Boys and Girls Club of London, Congdon needs a cane or walker to get around and struggles with pain.

But as bad as it is for her now, she said she fears surgical waits will get worse as baby boomers age.

“It’s going to be a flood,” she said.

The extent of the crisis became evident in August when Ontario first made public data it had kept secret for years — how long patients wait to see a specialist. Until then, citizens could see how long they would wait for surgery after seeing a specialist, but they were kept in the dark about the wait to see a specialist in the first place.

The most recent data, released by Health Quality Ontario, paint a fuller and more disturbing picture, one in which residents in the London region wait as much as eight times as long for surgery than do patients in other parts of the province.

“Our government has increased our investments in health care each and every year, allowing us to treat more patients, provide better care and reduce wait times to some of the shortest in the country . . . Ontario is also making specific investments in reducing wait times by improving access to specialized care and services, such as funding 2,800 more hip and knee replacements,” he wrote in an email.

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